Where Your Fear Is, That is Where Your Task Is...

Carl Jung said this.  And, it lands pretty accurate.  I so wish that my task could be elsewhere, somewhere I like better that isn’t all dark and scary. But, so far in this life, my task is always where my fear dominates.

I have a choice, I can run from, disassociate from, pretend it is different or I can face the fear I feel and move towards it.  I had a friend who used to say, “fear is like walking up to the Hoover Dam, it is so big, looming and impenetrable, and you are armed with a dental pick to get through it.  That is only how it appears and feels though.  In reality, fear is a membrane with a photo of the Hoover Dam on it and turns out that little dental pick is the perfect tool to help you puncture that membrane and walk right on through to the other side..."

I don’t know why this resonated with me so much.  But it did.  I am sure that I am ill prepared for the task at hand.  Lacking the wherewithal and the correct implements. But so far anyway, that has never happened.  I always have the things I need for whatever comes my way, and on those rare occasions I don’t?  My life circumstances cause me to develop and hone skills I either lack or possess in some sort of stunted form.

Fear is convincing.  Fear looms large.  Fear feels like truth but it isn’t.  It is no more true than anything else I think or feel.  So much of my reality is created by the bullshit my head dreams up, and is no more real than the next thing I think up.  The reality lands when I commit to a course of action or inaction in response to the fear.  I can give it a wide birth and then avoid, avoid, avoid (this is my hard wired default).  Or I can get busy in dialogue with the fear producing thoughts and feelings...and make some changes.

Carl Jung’s statement rings so true with me.  When I find myself in fear, I know immediately what my task is.  I have to confront the fear, dismantle it, do the work around it to alter it to something I am no longer afraid of because I have done the work to make the unknown, known.

Almost all of my fear is based on lack of information, or misconstruction of what is really going on.  I become afraid that this thing is going to happen or not.  And then I project the fuck out of reality so that the fear gets a great deal of headspace until it is running my life.  Today, I do a much better job of seeing fear at 50 paces and then doing the work I need to do to confront it, deal with it and move past it.  Sure there are all kinds of stories I can tell myself why whatever the fear is projecting could be true...but how often in my life has the fear been actually true?  Not all that often as it turns out.

I think today in my life, I do a pretty good job of dealing with the everyday life fears but I still get walloped good on the fears that are more ingrained and from past traumas.  It takes longer to see how these fears have become almost another version of my personage.  Like I am housing multiple people inside me and fear seems to take on an actual personality and then causes all these default behaviors to occur...

I do not believe we can live a life without fear. It is what keeps us alive after all.  But we can adopt a different approach to it..we can decide that when we see it or experience it, we can see it as a call to action.  This is where our task is...to confront the fear, do the thing, change the narrative.  I mean, we just get this one life, and I do not want to be limited by the things I am fearful of anymore than I want to curtail my lifespan and enjoyment of my life...

Today, most of the time, I see fear as my call to action.  I see fear as the manner and way to motivate me to do the work.  And the work becomes clear because I can see where the work is because fear is there like a flashing red arrow, highlighting the work I need to do next.  And I have become grateful for it.  Not always excited about the prospect of the work to be done.  But I have reached a level of acceptance about it.  Ok, here is the fear and so here is the next endeavor.  And this will move me forward into the next version of myself I want and need to be...

Again, still...